Aphra Behn (/ˈæfrəbɛn/;[a] 14 December 1640? (baptismal date)[1]–16 April 1689) was a British playwright, poet, translator and fiction writer from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors. Rising from obscurity, she came to the notice of Charles II, who employed her as a spy in Antwerp. Upon her return to London and a probable brief stay in debtors' prison, she began writing for the stage. She belonged to a coterie of poets and famous libertines such as John Wilmot, Lord Rochester. She wrote under the pastoral pseudonym Astrea. During the turbulent political times of the Exclusion Crisis, she wrote an epilogue and prologue that brought her into legal trouble; she thereafter devoted most of her writing to prose genres and translations. A staunch supporter of the Stuart line, she declined an invitation from Bishop Burnet to write a welcoming poem to the new king William III. She died shortly after.[2]

She is famously remembered in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own: "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."[3] Her grave is not included in the Poets' Corner but lies in the East Cloister near the steps to the church.[4]

Information regarding Behn's life is scant, especially regarding her early years. This may be due to intentional obscuring on Behn's part. One version of Behn's life tells that she was born to a barber named John Amis and his wife Amy.[5] Another story has Behn born to a couple named Cooper.[5]The Histories And Novels of the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn (1696) states that Behn was born to Bartholomew Johnson, a barber, and Elizabeth Denham, a wet-nurse.[5][6] Colonel Thomas Colepeper, the only person who claimed to have known her as a child, wrote in Adversaria that she was born at "Sturry or Canterbury"[b] to a Mr Johnson and that she had a sister named Frances.[2] Another contemporary, Anne Finch, wrote that Behn was born in Wye in Kent, the "Daughter to a Barber".[2] In some accounts the profile of her father fits Eaffrey Johnson.[2]

Behn was born during the buildup of the English Civil War, a child of the political tensions of the time. One version of Behn's story has her travelling with a Bartholomew Johnson to Surinam. He was said to die on the journey, with his wife and children spending some months in the country, though there is no evidence of this.[5][7] During this trip Behn said she met an African slave leader, whose story formed the basis for one of her most famous works, Oroonoko.[5][6] It is possible that she acted a spy in the colony.[2] There is little verifiable evidence to confirm any one story.[5] In Oroonoko Behn gives herself the position of narrator and her first biographer accepted the assumption that Behn was the daughter of the lieutenant general of Surinam, as in the story. There is little evidence that this was the case, and none of her contemporaries acknowledge any aristocratic status.[2][5] There is also no evidence that Oroonoko existed as an actual person or that any such slave revolt, as is featured in the story, really happened.

Writer Germaine Greer has called Behn "a palimpsest; she has scratched herself out," and biographer Janet Todd noted that Behn "has a lethal combination of obscurity, secrecy and staginess which makes her an uneasy fit for any narrative, speculative or factual. She is not so much a woman to be unmasked as an unending combination of masks".[7] It is notable that her name is not mentioned in tax or church records.[7] During her lifetime she was also known as Ann Behn, Mrs Bean, agent 160 and Astrea.[8]

A sketch of Aphra Behn by George Scharf from a portrait believed to be lost (1873)

Shortly after her supposed return to England from Surinam in 1664, Behn may have married Johan Behn (also written as Johann and John Behn). He may have been a merchant of German or Dutch extraction, possibly from Hamburg.[5][7] He died or the couple separated soon after 1664, however from this point the writer used the moniker "Mrs Behn" as her professional name.[6]

Behn may have had a Catholic upbringing. She once commented that she was "designed for a nun," and the fact that she had so many Catholic connections, such as Henry Neville who was later arrested for his Catholicism, would have aroused suspicions during the anti-Catholic fervour of the 1680s.[9] She was a monarchist, and her sympathy for the Stuarts, and particularly for the Catholic Duke of York may be demonstrated by her dedication of her play The Rover II to him after he had been exiled for the second time.[9] Behn was dedicated to the restored King Charles II. As political parties emerged during this time, Behn became a Tory supporter.[9]

By 1666 Behn had become attached to the court, possibly through the influence of Thomas Culpeper and other associates. The Second Anglo-Dutch War had broken out between England and the Netherlands in 1665, and she was recruited as a political spy in Antwerp on behalf of King Charles II, possibly under the auspices of courtier Thomas Killigrew.[2][5][6] This is the first well-documented account we have of her activities.[7] Her code name is said to have been Astrea, a name under which she later published many of her writings.[5] Her chief role was to establish an intimacy with William Scot, son of Thomas Scot, a regicide who had been executed in 1660. Scot was believed to be ready to become a spy in the English service and to report on the doings of the English exiles who were plotting against the King. Behn arrived in Bruges in July 1666, probably with two others, as London was wracked with plague and fire. Behn's job was to turn Scot into a double agent, but there is evidence that Scot betrayed her to the Dutch.[2][7]

Behn's exploits were not profitable however; the cost of living shocked her, and she was left unprepared. One month after arrival, she pawned her jewellry.[7] King Charles was slow in paying (if he paid at all), either for her services or for her expenses whilst abroad. Money had to be borrowed so that Behn could return to London, where a year's petitioning of Charles for payment was unsuccessful. It may be that she was never paid by the crown. A warrant was issued for her arrest, but there is no evidence it was served or that she went to prison for her debt, though apocryphally it is often given as part of her history.[2][7]

Forced by debt and her husband's death, Behn began to work for the King's Company and the Duke's Company players as a scribe. She had, however, written poetry up until this point.[5] While she is recorded to have written before she adopted her debt, it has been said[by whom?] that "Mrs. Behn wrote for a livelihood. Playwriting was her refuge from starvation and a debtor's prison."[10] The theatres that had been closed under Cromwell were now re-opening under Charles II, plays enjoying a revival. Her first play, The Forc’d Marriage, was staged in 1670, followed by The Amorous Prince (1671). After her third play, The Dutch Lover, failed, Behn falls off the public record for three years. It is speculated that she went travelling again, possibly in her capacity as a spy.[7] She gradually moved towards comic works, which proved more commercially successful.[6] Her most popular works included The Rover and Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87).

Behn became friends with notable writers of the day, including John Dryden, Elizabeth Barry, John Hoyle, Thomas Otway and Edward Ravenscroft, and was acknowledged as a part of the circle of the Earl of Rochester.[2][7] Behn often used her writings to attack the parliamentary Whigs claiming, "In public spirits call’d, good o’ th' Commonwealth... So tho' by different ways the fever seize...in all ’tis one and the same mad disease." This was Behn's reproach to parliament which had denied the king funds.[9]

In all she would write and stage 19 plays, contribute to more, and become one of the first prolific, high-profile female dramatists in Britain.[2] During the 1670s and 1680s she was one of the most productive playwrights in Britain, second only to Poet LaureateJohn Dryden.[8]

In her last four years, Behn's health began to fail, beset by poverty and debt, but she continued to write ferociously, though it became increasingly hard for her to hold a pen. In her final days, she wrote the translation of the final book of Abraham Cowley’s Six Books of Plants. She died on 16 April 1689, and was buried in the East Cloister Westminster Abbey. The inscription on her tombstone reads: "Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be Defence enough against Mortality."[11] She was quoted as stating that she had led a "life dedicated to pleasure and poetry."[2][7][12]

Her balmy Lips encountring his,
Their Bodies as their Souls are joyn'd,
Where both in Transports were confin'd,
Extend themselves upon the Moss.
Cloris half dead and breathless lay,
Her Eyes appear'd like humid Light,
Such as divides the Day and Night;
Or falling Stars, whose Fires decay;
And now no signs of Life she shows,
But what in short-breath-sighs returns and goes.

He saw how at her length she lay,
He saw her rising Bosom bare,
Her loose thin Robes, through which appear
A Shape design'd for Love and Play;
Abandon'd by her Pride and Shame,
She do's her softest Sweets dispence,
Offring her Virgin-Innocence
A Victim to Loves Sacred Flame;
Whilst th' or'e ravish'd Shepherd lies,
Unable to perform the Sacrifice.

Behn is now regarded as a key dramatist of the seventeenth-century theatre,[5] and her prose work is critically acknowledged as having been important to the development of the English novel.[6] She is perhaps best known to modern audiences for her short novel Oroonoko (1688), the tale of an enslaved African prince. It is notable for its exploration of slavery, race, and gender.[6]

Behn was immensely prolific, writing plays, fiction and poetry, and translating works from French. She caused scandal in some of her chosen subject matter, often alluding to sexual desire. She was aware, and stated that, the works would not have caused problems if they had been written by a man.[5][6][14] Behn's work frequently takes homoerotic themes, featuring same-sex love between women. One of her best-known poems, "The Disappointment", is the story of a sexual encounter told from a woman's point of view that may be interpreted as a work about male impotence.[5] Critics Lisa Zeitz and Peter Thoms contend that the poem "playfully and wittily questions conventional gender roles and the structures of oppression which they support".[15]

The criticism around her poetry focuses on the themes of gender, sexuality, femininity, pleasure, and love. A feminist critique tends to focus on Behn's inclusion of female pleasure and sexuality in her poetry, which was a radical concept at the time she was writing. One critic, Alison Conway, views Behn as instrumental to the formation of modern thought around the female gender and sexuality: "Behn wrote about these subjects before the technologies of sexuality we now associate were in place, which is, in part, why she proves so hard to situate in the trajectories most familiar to us”.[16]

According to critic Elizabeth Young, Behn's work exemplifies pastoral poetry — an idealized portrayal of rural life.[17] In analyzing Behn's poem "On a Juniper Tree, cut down to make Busks" (published 1684), Young sees Behn as exploring the connections of human sexuality and bucolic nature by personifying a juniper tree, under which two lovers lie, as not only an observer but "a participant in the lovers' intercourse".[17] Further, by giving the tree an ambiguous gender, Behn upends the traditional scene of "clearcut seductions of shepherdesses by shepherds".[17]

Modern critics have also seen Behn's poetry as reflecting utopian longings.[18]

All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds... Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind but was of practical importance.[19]

Following the death of Behn, new female dramatists such as 'Ariadne', Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix, Susanna Centlivre and Catherine Trotter acknowledged Behn as their most vital predecessor, who opened up public space for women writers.[2][8] During the 19th century, both the writer and her works were ignored or dismissed as indecent.[2] Victorian-era novelist and critic Julia Kavanagh wrote that, "the disgrace of Aphra Behn is that, instead of raising man to woman's moral standard, [she] sank woman to the level of man's coarseness".[8] Nineteenth-century commentator John Doran wrote that her work wallowed in the moral morass.[8]

In the 20th century, however, Behn's fame underwent a revival. Montague Summers, an author of scholarly works on the English drama of the 17th century, published a six-volume collection of her work, in hopes of rehabilitating her reputation. Summers was fiercely passionate about the work of Behn and found himself incredibly devoted to the appreciation of 17th century literature.[10]Felix Schelling wrote in The Cambridge History of English Literature, that she was "a very gifted woman, compelled to write for bread in an age in which literature... catered habitually to the lowest and most depraved of human inclinations," and that, "Her success depended upon her ability to write like a man." Edmund Gosse remarked that she was, "...the George Sand of the Restoration".[20]

Behn is now regarded as a key English playwright and a major figure in Restoration theatre.[2][21]George Woodcock regarded Behn as an important influence on the development of the novel, stating "It is as a founder of the school of realistic novel-writing that Mrs. Behn is perhaps most important." [22] Authors such as Janet Todd detail Behn's unique exploration of race, gender and sexual agency. However, critic Harold Bloom calls Behn a "fourth-rate playwright" and cites the current appearance of her work as set texts in American schools as a case of "dumbing down."[23]

Todd argues that, in addition to patriarchal prejudice, Behn suffered for her dismissal of any liberal agenda. Going against the tide of the times, she believed in the divine right of kings and aristocratic hierarchies. Todd writes that Behn was contemptuous of democracy and the common man in the street, not expressly interested in human rights — for women or slaves or anyone else — and that, because she did not support any kind of a liberal agenda, her causes were not cheered by the progressives.[8] She does not easily fit into any mould of proto-feminism. She had come into adulthood, following the English Civil War, under the harsh puritan rule of the Restoration, and regarded political populism as a sign of moral collapse and the triumph of venality.

Ironically, the current revival of her reputation rides on the work Oroonoko (1688), a story that is taken to promote modern, progressive views on gender, race and class. Todd maintains that the fiction has been co-opted by modern interests and that such views are not views that Behn clearly expressed.[8] Her reputation is not helped by the fact that almost nothing is known of her first 27 years; and while she was a pioneer, she also faced debt for much of her life and was a propagandist and writer for hire. She was ambitious, desiring fame and literary prestige, which for a woman of the time and in times since, is often regarded as suspect.[8]

Project Continua: Biography of Aphra Behn Project Continua is a web-based multimedia resource dedicated to the creation and preservation of women’s intellectual history from the earliest surviving evidence into the 21st Century.